The Land of Contrasts eBook

when I returned to civilisation. On the whole,
it may be philosophic to conclude that a universal
habit in any country has some solid if cryptic reason
for its existence, and to surmise that the drinking
of ice-water is not so deadly in the States as it
might be elsewhere. It certainly is universal
enough. When you ring a bell or look at a waiter,
ice-water is immediately brought to you. Each
meal is started with a full tumbler of that fluid,
and the observant darkey rarely allows the tide to
ebb until the meal is concluded. Ice-water is
provided gratuitously and copiously on trains, in
waiting-rooms, even sometimes in the public fountains.
If, finally, I were asked to name the characteristic
sound of the United States, which would tell you of
your whereabouts if transported to America in an instant
of time, it would be the musical tinkle of the ice
in the small white pitchers that the bell-boys in
hotels seem perennially carrying along all the corridors,
day and night, year in and year out.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] Lady Theodora Guest, sister of the Duke of Westminster,
in her book, “A Round Trip in North America,”
bears the same testimony: “Over eleven
thousand miles of railway travelling and miles untold
of driving besides, without an accident or a semblance
of one. No contretemps of any kind, except
the little delay at Hope from the ‘washout,’
which did not matter the least; lovely weather, and
universal kindness and courtesy from man, woman, and
child.”

[31]
“Had you seen but those roads before they
were made,
You would hold up your hands and bless
General Wade.”

[32] This epithet must not confirm the usual erroneous
belief that Florida means “the flowery State.”
It is so called because discovered on Easter Day (Spanish
Pascua Florida).

XIII

The American Note

Those who have done me the honour to read through
the earlier pages of this volume will probably find
nothing in the present chapter that has not already
been implied in them, if not expressed. Indeed,
I should not consider these pages written to any purpose
if they did not give some indication of what I believe
to be the dominant trend of American civilisation.
A certain amount of condensed explication and recapitulation
may not, however, be out of place.

In spite of the heterogeneous elements of which American
civilisation consists, and in spite of the ever-ready
pitfalls of spurious generalisation, it seems to me
that there is very distinctly an American note, different
in pitch and tone from any note in the European concert.
The scale to which it belongs is not, indeed, one
out of all relation to that of the older hemisphere,
in the way, for example, in which the laws governing
Chinese music seem to stand apart from all relations
to those on which the Sonata Appassionata is constructed.
“The American,” as Emerson said, “is
only the continuation of the English genius into new
conditions, more or less propitious;” and the
American note, as I understand it, is, with allowance
for modifications by other nationalities, after all
merely the New World incarnation of a British potentiality.